Re: [Groff] new automake system

[Bertrand Garrigues]

Werner,

On Mon, Sep 29 2014 at 04:55:16 PM, Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:
>> As long as we keep the --with-appresdir option, packagers would not
>> have extra work. As said previously, Arch linux uses
>> --with-appresdir=/usr/share/X11/app-defaults, and it seems that
>> Debian (https://packages.debian.org/jessie/groff) passes
>> --with-appresdir=/etc/X11/app-defaults to configure.
>
> Thanks for your analysis.  Can you write and commit a patch for the
> `master' branch?

Yes, however there are two issues:

First, in groff.m4, the macro GROFF_APPRESDIR_DEFAULT tries to find the
'root of X11' by locating libX11. Either by using the program 'xmkmf' or
by a list of predefined paths. Incidently there is a bug, when we try to
search it in the list of predefined directories, the condition:

if test ! -r $groff_dir/libX11.$groff_extension

should be:

if test -r $groff_dir/libX11.$groff_extension

Currently the loop stops at the first item of groff_x_libdirs (if
/usr/X11/lib does not contain any lib, which is very likely the
case). But the main problem is that if I install xmkmf or if I fix the
condition above, the appresdir is set to /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/,
which is not consistent with my system's choice to put app-defaults in
/usr/share/X11/app-defaults. But it is maybe still consistent on older
systems.

-> So, should I try to support this old behavior (looking for libX11),
  or should I directly write something very simple, like looking for
  app-defaults in a few defaults directory like /usr/share/X11,
  /usr/lib/X11, /etc/X11 (this was my first intention) ? Note that the
  possibility to use --with-appresdir is still there.

Second point, we had this whole discussion because the build system
installed unconditionaly X11 resources in the main install tree, no
matter what prefix you put, forcing the use of DESTDIR when calling 'make
distcheck'.

-> Should we keep this behaviour, or should we add the prefix to
appresdir (I would favour this second option) ?

Regards,

--
Bertrand Garrigues